EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia subscribe LEADERSHIP / DIGITAL INCLUSION / INNOVATION / DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION / SINGAPORE EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet EXPERT OPINION EXCLUSIVE Time for 21s Century Government Chris Moore OpenGov in conversation with Dr. Tan Tin Wee, a pioneer whose innovations shaped the nature of the Internet. 09/11/2016 EXCLUSIVE What to look for in your new Chief Digital Ofcer By Priyankar Bhunia Chris Moore Insights into IoT development in the AsiaPacifc region Dean Koh Fighting cybersecurity threats through User Behaviour Analytics and Defense in Depth approach Priyankar Bhunia Dr. Tan Tin Wee’s resume is that of a quintessential renaissance man. A trained molecular biologist, he ended up introducing the Internet and the Web to Singapore. He led the first Internet service VIEW MORE http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia provider, Technet Unit, National University of Singapore (NUS), for academia and research in the country. SOLUTIONS HUB His innovations made the Internet accessible to people using nonLatin scripts around the world and facilitated global sharing of scientific information. Fortinet Unisys A roving intellect led him to keep pushing the boundaries of technology, streaming live video from Singapore around the world, while the Internet was still in its infancy and developing prototypes for online stock trading and e-commerce. He was an inaugural inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, along with the Fathers of the Internet, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee and US Vice President Al Gore. He was the only Singaporean and one of three Asians in this illustrious group. At the moment, among his several positions is the role of Director at the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) in Singapore. Red Hat MORE LISTINGS EVENTS WHEN 17/11/2016 WHERE Melbourne Victoria OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 Victoria OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 Enabling Digital Transformation within the Victorian Government In the first instalment of this two-part interview, we talk to Dr. Tan about his accomplishments during the early days of the Internet. In the second part, he tells us what is engaging his mind at present and how he visualises the not-too-distant future. When asked him about his milestones, Dr. Tan summarised his achievements saying, “At a personal level, it’s about making a difference in the way I think about information. From the perspective of my research community, the most important achievement was enabling researchers to search scientific data online with ease and convenience, by creating some of the earliest online biological databases." WHEN 22/02/2017 WHERE Jakarta Indonesia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 Indonesia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 - Towards a Smarter Safer Indonesia WHEN 23/03/2017 WHERE Sepang Utara Malaysia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 Malaysia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 - Collaborate, Innovate, Transform For the country, it was about getting a headstart in terms of entering the Internet Age. From a global perspective, it was to drive innovations and the adoption of new Internet features.” MORE EVENTS A paradigm shift in scientific research http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia Dr. Tan played a key role in ensuring that scientific information, data, literature and software was available on the web. Describing the paradigm shift he said, “You no longer had to go to a physical location in order to interrogate databases and retrieve information.” The community also acquired the ability to publish information online and share it with anyone around the world. As a molecular biologist in the department of biochemistry at NUS since 1990, he pioneered the use of biological databases, which were searchable using a text indexing system called WAIS (Wide Area Information Server). It was subsequently combined with the Gopher Protocol developed at the University of Minnesota, that allowed distributing, searching, and retrieving documents. In 1992, the first Gopher website was set up in Singapore. In September 1993, he set up Singapore’s first website, which was a biological database, biomed.nus.sg (bic.nus.edu.sg today). This led to the establishment of the bioinformatics centre in 1996. Dr. Tan was the founding director. Dr. Tan was also involved in setting up mirror sites, because all the data sites back then were largely in the west. Collaboration with http://bio-mirror.net/ became another key milestone, in 1998. It allowed researchers in the region to easily access the data. Dr. Tan also helped to create the Cyberspace Hospital for Prof K.C. Lun (former President of the International Medical Informatics Association). It provided access to global health information resources on the Internet using a virtual hospital setting, foreshadowing the wealth of online hospital resources and medical information today. Bridging the digital divide Multi-lingual text, domain names and email addresses Before 1995, non-Latin characters couldn’t be displayed on the Internet’s Web browser graphical interface. Only ASCII characters could be displayed. As a result, a large percentage of the world’s population, who use nonhttp://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia Latin scripts, couldn’t publish information in their own language script on the Internet. Different communities adhered to their own encoding systems, for example, the Japanese Shift JIS and the Chinese GB. Dr. Tan and his team at the Internet Research and Development Unit (IRDU) in NUS were involved in the early days of adopting Unicode as a standard. At that time Unicode was in its infancy and few realised its potential in handling text of almost all of the world's writing systems as it does today. In 1994-95, they displayed Chinese characters dynamically on the World Wide Web. This was followed by Tamil. In 1995, the team produced a four-language website, displaying the Singaporean pledge in four official languages, English, Tamil, Chinese and Malay. In 1996, Dr. Tan worked with Prof. V.K. Samaranayake, considered the "Father of Information Technology" in Sri Lanka and Prof. S.T. Nandasara from the University of Colombo, Dr. Tan helped create a trilingual website, www.lk, which is still in existence today. The work was published in INET'97, in a paper entitled 'Trilingual SinhalaTamil-English National Website of Sri Lanka'. There was still the barrier of domain names. The Internet disenfranchised were being forced to key in English characters, which they could hardly recognise on the keyboard, in order to access a website in their own language. It took over a decade for standardisation and adoption because the western community had objections regarding the necessity or the methods. The delay forced communities to learn English. It turned out to be an inadvertent benefit, as English is effectively the global lingua franca. Finally, after more than a decade of lobbying, this domain name standard has been adopted by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) in support of their slogan, “One World. One Internet”. Introducing the Internet to the disabled Dr. Tan was also involved in introducing the Internet to the disabled. http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia In line with his inclusive vision of the Internet, he was determined to ensure that no one got left behind in accessing the benefits of the online world, just because of a physical impairment. He personally set up the modems, routers and network cards for the Singapore School for the Deaf (SSD), the first primary school in Singapore to get Internet access, because he believed in early intervention. These children had to look at each other and communicate through hand signals. Dr. Tan said, “Imagine the delight on their faces when I introduced to them, something as simple as IRC (Internet relay chat). This was in 1994. Before any of the mainstream primary schools introduced Internet, I had brought the Internet to this special education primary school. For the first time in their lives, these kids were able to talk to each other, without having to look at each other.” Later other disability schools also joined in. Seeing a Braille printer at the Singapore School for the Visually Handicapped, Dr. Tan tried to take Project Gutenberg’s treasure trove of digital books and automatically map the text and translate into Braille, without necessarily having any human intervention. He was also appointed to the board of International Centre for Disability Resources on the Internet (ICDRI). http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia Unicasting and Multicasting On 9th of August, 1994, the National Day parade in Singapore was broadcast live to students in Tasmania, Chicago and Cambridge. After watching the parade, they were interviewed live for the 9’o clock news. The live TV feed from Singapore Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), was streamed using multi-casting and uni-casting. Back then, it was unprecedented to have video interviewing over the Internet. At that time, only NASA streamed live video via CU-SeeMe for public consumption. Even BBC was not videocasted. The team used a combination of unicast CU-SeeMe for Mac users and RAT and VIC (respectively standing for Robust Audio Tool and Videoconferencing tool) multicasting for Unix plaforms. CU-SeeMe was an early Internet videoconferencing client, which could make point to point video calls without a server or make multi-point calls through server software called a "reflector". Dr. Tan talked about the excitement, “We told all our friends by email that we are doing this incredible thing. Can you guys set up your CU-SeeMe reflectors?” Online stock exchange and e-commerce prototype Dr. Tan also worked on developing an online simulated stock exchange for Singapore, Project StockNet, in which they collected data from the Stock Exchange and converted it into a stock trading engine. This StockNet project was published as conference papers in 1995 and 1997. In 1996, Phillip POEMS (Phillip's Online Electronic Mart System) was launched. Charles Schwab in the US later came out with their own web trading solutions. Adding to the long list of milestones, Dr. Tan worked on a project for an e-commerce prototype. They developed an online pizza ordering system, using Common Gateway Interface (CGI). GIF stacking images were used so that people could order the toppings. The ordering system was connected to a fax that would send a request to deliver your food to any location. Dr. Tan was overseeing Singapore's first ISP, called Technet, for research and academic use, as the third Head, from 1994 to 1995. He oversaw its commercialisation in 1995 to become Pacific Internet http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia under Sembawang Media. He led Technet to offer the first graphical interface access using SLIP and PPP technology before Windows 95 provided a built-in TCP/IP stack in the operating system. Today Singapore is at the forefront of digital transformation, leveraging technology to transform society and individual lives. In the next part of the interview, we look at Dr. Tan’s vision and plans for taking his research community and his nation to the next level. The second part of the interview: Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning Priyankar Bhunia Priyankar is based out of our Singapore office and is part of the editorial team. An engineer and MBA by education, he has prior experience in investment banking, media and tech startups. He spends his spare time reading and rambling. RECENT ARTICLES BY Priyankar Bhunia MAS announces proof-of-concept project to use blockchain technology for inter-bank payments Face Verifcation Service launched in Ausralia for DFAT and AFP with security and privacy safeguards EXCLUSIVE- The JurongHealth IT Journey – Integrating IT from the ground-up into a new digital hospital RELATED ARTICLES RELATED EVENTS EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning Victoria OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 EXCLUSIVE - Smart Nation Innovations at A*STAR (Part 2) – Supercomputing and Nextgeneration Networks Singapore OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 Wesern Ausralia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 EXCLUSIVE - Smart Nation Innovations at A*STAR (Part 1) – Big Data, IoT, Mobility http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flashback to the 90s - Building an inclusive Internet | 2016-11-09 | OpenGovAsia RELATED RESEARCH & REPORTS 10 reasons your city needs a srategy to capitalise on the Internet of Things today RELATED PRODUCTS Sitecore Red Hat SAS Insitute How to improve end user dissatisfaction with mobility Collaboration builds better performing applications ABOUT US CONTACT US PRIVACY POLICY COOKIE POLICY JOIN OUR TEAM SITEMAP ADVERTISE WITH US Media Kit EVENTS Sponsorship Opportunities TESTIMONIALS Customers COPYRIGHT ©2016. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRIVACY POLICY Delegates | TERMS OF USE. DESIGN, CMS, HOSTING & WEB DEVELOPMENT :: EPUBLISHING http://www.opengovasia.com/articles/7217-exclusive---flashback-to-the-90s---building-an-inclusive-internet[17/11/2016 10:07:47 AM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... subscribe INNOVATION / BIG DATA ANALYTICS / SINGAPORE / DATA CENTRES EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning Dr. Tan Tin Wee talks about challenges in the supercomputing arena and shares his vision of the future of research. 13/11/2016 By Priyankar Bhunia EXPERT OPINION EXCLUSIVE - Time for 21s Century Government Chris Moore EXCLUSIVE What to look for in your new Chief Digital Ofcer Chris Moore Insights into IoT development in the Asia-Pacifc region Dean Koh Fighting cybersecurity threats through User Behaviour Analytics and Defense in Depth approach Priyankar Bhunia VIEW MORE In this second part of the interview (read the first part here), Dr. Tan Tin Wee tells us what is engaging his mind at present. He shares his vision of the not-too-distant future, with supercomputers built in housing developments and a seamless bench-tobedside flow to dynamically create precise personalised SOLUTIONS HUB Fortinet Unisys http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... medical treatments. Dr. Tan hasn’t ceased his constant striving to explore and expand the frontiers of technology. He talks about coming back full cycle, as technology reaches a point where everything he has worked on during the past 26 years as a professor in the Department of Biochemistry in the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine comes together to potentially transform healthcare and biomedical research. Since June 2015, Dr. Tan has been in the position of Director of the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) in Singapore. Red Hat MORE LISTINGS EVENTS WHEN 17/11/2016 WHERE Melbourne Victoria OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 Victoria OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 - Enabling Digital Transformation within the Victorian Government Smart approach to supercomputing Wearing his latest hat as Director of the supercomputing centre of Singapore, Dr Tan explained how Singapore is choosing a smarter approach to becoming a player in Exascale computing. Singapore has neither the billions of dollars to throw at such a challenge, nor does it have problems that can reach that scale, at least, not yet. WHEN 22/02/2017 WHERE Jakarta Indonesia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 Indonesia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 - Towards a Smarter Safer Indonesia However, there would be requirements to crunch genomic information, which is not as ‘big data’ as nuclear physics or Hadron Collider type projects, but still needs significant computational power. One possibility is to work on genomic precision medicine interfacing with hospital healthcare delivery. WHEN 23/03/2017 WHERE Sepang Utara Malaysia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 Malaysia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 - Collaborate, Innovate, Transform MORE EVENTS The Long Fat Pipe Problem Today we have access to terabytes of portable hard drives for a few hundred dollars. Storage is cheap. And massive amounts of data are being generated as the world gets more and more connected. But the speed with which the Internet can support big data transfers over global distances has remained severely limited. One terabyte of data cannot be transferred from one global location to another through the Internet in a reasonable timeframe. Today, it is probably still cheaper to ship terabytes in a hard disk drive via courier. Over global distances the data throughput suffers from the so-called Long Fat Pipe problem (bandwidth-delay product). Unless there is careful tuning, increasing the http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... bandwidth over global distances where there is a long round-trip time, the throughput drops significantly. Laying out the contours of the problem, Dr. Tan said, “TCP/IP is a cold war technology. It is a communications protocol. It is not specifically optimised for big data transmission. For supercomputers, InfiniBand is already being used as the most popular interconnect protocol, but only within the confines of HPC data centres. So Dr. Tan and his team at NSCC explored another option, long-range InfiniBand. Now, this technology by Obsidian Strategics has been around since the early 2000s but no one had deployed it for academic research networks, other than the military, NASA and a few banks. Dr. Tan and his team demonstrated that a global network of InfiniBand interconnections could work, providing a more efficient protocol for transmitting big data over large trans-oceanic distances. (OpenGov has previously reported in greater detail on the work on next-generation networks being done at A*STAR.) Dr. Tan said, “Now how do we build the infrastructure to allow the supercomputers talk to each other and compute together on a single problem. That is our current challenge, how to build a galaxy of supercomputers, over high speed networks.” Image representative of NSCC data centre (Courtesy of NSCC) The cooling problem http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... It has been estimated that data centres of the world consume between 5 to 10% of total electricity consumption. And this is a growing number. Every time we see an email attachment or we share a video clip on Whatsapp, it is stored on a spinning disk somewhere and this disk must continuously spin for the next ten years at least. Making the data readily accessible, and replicating in backups in multiple data centres is neither scalable nor environmentally sustainable, as the world's storage needs grow to the Yottabyte range. Hence, Dr. Tan is searching for truly creative solutions. Like big data storage, densely packed supercomputers also emit a lot of heat. This could be combined with a heat requiring industrial system. Better still, the facility could produce cold output to cool these systems. As an example of this potential industrial symbiosis, Dr. Tan said, “I want to build my next supercomputer next to the Singapore LNG receiving terminal in Jurong. They have minus 162 degrees cold energy which they currently throw out into the sea. Give me the cold sea water and I can cool my data centre, without any additional cost. Right now, we are venting the heat out to the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, which the LNG plant could use for regasification of the liquefied natural gas.” The low grade heat generated from a data centre which is otherwise pretty useless, could actually provide hot water supply for domestic uses. Thus, housing estates could actually house supercomputers using long-range InfiniBand connections. The future of research- Bringing it all together Dr. Tan feels he has come full circle now in his journey, “The last 25 years of my working life has been characterised by very interesting developments. I never imagined as molecular biologist that I would run an Internet service provider. But I did and I innovated on it. It helped the bioinformatics community. Now I am running a supercomputing centre. And I am thinking of combining HPC with the Internet, with biology, and with hospital health care information to provide better health care for an ever-increasingly aging population. It is about putting all the disparate pieces together.” http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... Dr. Tan said that he would like to build a research lab of the future on top of this green and globally interconnected supercomputer network. In 1992-93, before the Internet era, he wrote in an article that researchers will need not go to the library to search for the latest journals. They will be able to search, download and read scientific literature instantaneously. Today it is a given. In his words, this is the what the future of research could look like: “Today I would like to make another prediction. Soon research scientists will be able to carry out research at the speed of thought. You think about the scientific experiment, interrogate databases, design the experiment and you ‘order’ it. Virtual laboratories, like transcriptic.com and emeraldcloudlabs.com have already started offering their services online. The results will be generated by technicians controlling robots working in virtualised highly inter-connected scientific laboratories. Quality of service agreements would guarantee you the best results each time. Of course, you must incorporate experimental control, and check the provenance of the data sets. The resulting data sets can be aggregated and placed in searchable data banks. They can also be sent to deep learning engines. Using the bench-to-bedside (research bench to hospital bedside) workflows and computational pipelines, we can create personalised medical treatments dynamically and with great precision. You can have cures developed on the fly. The scientists and the doctors will be working together to discover what disease the person is suffering from, based on genomic analysis. Drugs and vaccines will be designed with molecular modelling and machine learning. Then an automated laboratory will be able to verify and deliver experimental results to ensure that the treatment given to that patient is safe and will lead to a good prognosis. That is the future I would like to be actively involved in: Research at the speed of thought.” http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... Priyankar Bhunia Priyankar is based out of our Singapore office and is part of the editorial team. An engineer and MBA by education, he has prior experience in investment banking, media and tech startups. He spends his spare time reading and rambling. RECENT ARTICLES BY Priyankar Bhunia MAS announcements on FinTech Regulation - Striking the right balance MAS announces proof-of-concept project to use blockchain technology for inter-bank payments Face Verifcation Service launched in Ausralia for DFAT and AFP with security and privacy safeguards RELATED ARTICLES RELATED EVENTS EXCLUSIVE - Smart Nation Innovations at A*STAR (Part 2) – Supercomputing and Nextgeneration Networks Singapore OpenGov Leadership Forum 2016 EXCLUSIVE - Eye to the future at IDA - IoT, AI and more Wesern Ausralia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 Malaysia OpenGov Leadership Forum 2017 EXCLUSIVE - Smart Nation Innovations at A*STAR (Part 1) – Big Data, IoT, Mobility RELATED RESEARCH & REPORTS Key capabilities of a public sector service virtualisation solution RELATED PRODUCTS Palo Alto Networks SAS Insitute Unisys 4 Steps to automate compliance and minimize your risks [OG Partner] How to improve end user dissatisfaction with mobility ABOUT US ADVERTISE WITH US Media Kit http://www.opengovasia.com/...o-the-future-of-research-bringing-together-supercomputing-virtualisation-automation-and-deep-learning[17/11/2016 7:15:46 PM] EXCLUSIVE - Flash-forward to the future of research: Bringing together supercomputing, virtualisation, automation and deep learning | 2016-11-13 | OpenGov... 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